Monthly Archives: February 2013

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I don’t always appreciate useful items until I don’t have them. For instance, months will pass and I won’t give a second thought to my plain black belt which is really very utilitarian in my life. I wear it about five times a week. However, every time I put on my fancy cowboy boots, which is about 3 times a year, I spend time admiring their impractical allure.

This week I realized that I have been undervaluing a very simple tool I use almost every day. Our spatula that was supposed to be heat resistant to like 400 degrees on the Newton Scale was incinerated. This happened when I asked my nine-year old daughter to continue stirring the Brussels sprouts I was sautéing while I ran to help her sister with something that was causing her to shriek my name repeatedly from the next room.

This is my fault entirely since I gave her very specific instructions on how to hold the pan and turn the vegetables. I did not, however, mention that when she became bored she should probably not wander off while the pan, spatula and contents were still on the burner.

Both Brussels sprouts and spatula did not survive the incident but the smell of charred vegetable flesh and silicone beckoned me back before first responders had to be called.

Anyway, at first I thought I might be able to still use the implement, but it had been degraded so much that silicone was flaking off in chunks that strangely resembled coarsely ground pepper. Since, I’m pretty sure that silicone isn’t included on the current food pyramid, I thought of another solution.

I took my kitchen shears and cut the offending part off the spatula.

That should do the trick.

But, I couldn’t get the correct slant for optimum scraping, so I kept cutting off additional tiny bits trying to “even it up.” Finally at the point it started to look less like a spatula and more like very fat chopstick, I gave up.

Sorry I didn’t appreciate you little spatula. Don’t worry; you are irreplaceable—at least for the next couple of months.

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